Hair

A female relative of mine had long shoulder length hair which in the course of time had turned quite grey and definitely moved toward white.  One day she had it styled and shortened so that she now wore her hair cropped relatively close to her skull maybe an inch, two or three or so (I'm not so good with measurements) long, and the effect was dramatic.  From my perspective it was all good; instead of hanging hair that fell now here now there around her face, which she had to push back from time to time, and which was a spread of a kind of dismal color, she had a head of hair that approximated her skull, that was neat and good looking.  But she reported to me that almost all women she met, at the library, in the store, wherever in the small town she lived, said (and it was only women; what male notices a woman's hairdo unless he is gay?) "oh, so now you're a lesbian," or "what are you trying to advertise?"  I was dumbfounded but evidently if you are going to look trim, handsome and intelligent like Rachel Maddow, you must be, well, you know.  Does that explain all those ridiculous women on morning television news or evening for that matter, whose hair is down to their shoulders and falling around them, as though they were all set to go out on a date instead of talking seriously about the world situation?  And especially when they are with male presenters on the same program, who not only wear suits and ties as a rule, but wear their combed and short in a business-like way.  That is to say, they do not call attention to their personal appearance.  Are women afraid that if they look business-like at all, they will be immediately judged a lesbian?  Are lesbians the only women in our time who are allowed to look intelligent, as though they are not about to be judged in a beauty contest?  Thank God for Angela Merkle as opposed to Hillary Clinton, who is a relatively old woman, always behind the podium with all that hair hanging down around her face.  Don't women get tired of flicking the stuff out of their eyes, nose and mouth?  Watching a seventeen year old girl deal with the strands of hair that have settled at her mouth can be very appealing, but then one does not expect much from a seventeen year old girl but to excite the fantasies of males.  But when you grow up and talk national news, hey, it's time to get that hair cut.  My husband and I have our own maneuvers with the bits of hair left to the elderly male.  He saw his growing grayer and sparser, and then really disappearing completely on top, and took the intelligent way out of that dilemma which was to shave his head.  Look at Stanley Tucci, that mouth watering confection of stage and screen, who has a shining bald head, which as one always knows with Italians or those of Italian descent,  is a sign of maximum testosterone and a very hairy chest.  Yummy!  Whereas I, with still a covering of hair that suggests the growth that was mine in my youth, have followed the instructions of my once upon a time hairdresser daughter-in-law, and comb it back which forces it to fluff up a bit.  More recently, I have been instructed by my soon to be granddaughter-in-law, to apply mousse to this fluff, not so much that I become like all those eighty year old women my age who have created impregnable and impervious helmets for their heads, but just enough to give it what they all call "body."  Well, I know from chance viewings in mirrors at funny angles, that there isn't all that much on the back and maybe sides, and pink, pink scalp shows through a lot of places, but head-on in the mirror, particularly with an overhead light shining down on it, I look as though I had a full bodied thick head of hair, and at the end it's only my view that matters.

Vandals, Ravage, and Ruin

Once upon a time I taught in a women's college where there was a policy of not hiring single male instructors (obviously in the days before discrimination policies).  I, who was recently widowed, was thus an exception, but there was also a studio art instructor, a single male, who was a last minute hire of desperation.  Outcasts, the both of us, we hung out together a lot, and as the months rolled by he painted a rather large formal portrait of me in oil, very much the grieving twenty five year old, replete with a black tie of mourning.  Years later, when it hung in the foyer of our departmental office at another university, where I was chair, more or less as a joke--the hang not my appointment--an abrasive bright New York Jewish lesbian (did I need the word abrasive?) who was a talented artist suggested that the work would be much improved if she added a representation of my current forty five year old bearded, flushed, and rounded face, as a doll head that the grieving youth would be holding in his hands.  This would be an allusion to a large collection of doll's heads that graced or deformed, take your pick, the mantelpiece in the conversational parlor of our baronial home.  I agreed, and she carried out her idea, but in doing so she made the head much larger so that in a sense it looked like the seated youth was holding the head of someone who had recently been guillotined.  It was unsettling, but to my mind it improved upon the placid aura of the original.  Years later a visiting artist friend from those long ago days of teaching together at the women's college was visiting and was horrified when she saw the portrait with the new head.  "That's vandalism," she exclaimed.  Luckily the original artist had died, though sad for him since it was way way too early, and I was freed of the necessity of having to explain or apologize to anyone.  But I have never forgotten her reaction, ever.  I somehow did not know or consider back then what is now commonplace, the idea that an artist always has a moral ownership of anything he/she has made.  Years later I was showing a very good Boston framer a group of Piranesi prints that needed re-matting since the paper or cardboard of the original mats had chemicals in them that were discoloring and damaging the actual print with which it had contact.  He was quoting me what would be a very substantial price for the work, and I was deliberating aloud whether or not I could afford this, to which he responded: "Well, so this set gets destroyed.  You know there is an awful lot of art in this world, and I guess it really wouldn't matter if some of it disappeared.  I can, as they say, nowadays, relate--well, in a way.  It's not that I feel the burden of the world's surplus art works, but having spent my life in study of Greek and Roman antiquity I am familiar with and comfortable with ruins.  Who would want to see the Parthenon whole, and tarted up with paint, like it was originally?  Who does not appreciate the rich vibrations one gets from reading the poems of Sappho which are so many of them, simply tantalizing fragments of the merest hint of ideas or images.  How breathtaking it is to walk into a Turkish village and find a temple growing out of the back of a stable, or rather really the stable having been added to the temple?  I love my grieving self, sweet, innocent, and full of promise, holding the impish bearded alcohol-flushed me of middle years.

What's For Dinner?

Richard had brought home a bunch of peppers, so I decided to make stuffed peppers.  I wanted lamb for this.  Today I went to all the meat departments of the supermarkets and specialty stores in a radius of maybe fifteen miles; none had lamb for sale.  "Only at Easter," was the stock response.  There was only beef, pork, chicken, and some ground turkey, and it seemed that beef was still the biggest seller despite all the alarms being sounded about the potential health hazards in consuming beef.  Ah, well, nobody seems to believe in global warming either.  Mary Roach whose new book entitled Gulp is all about the phenomenon of digestion has several pages on the diet of the Inuit who reserve a major part of their diet for animal organs, something, as she points out, not to be found in the butcher shops of the lower forty nine states.  Reading that took me back to the Sunday morning breakfast of my childhood when we almost invariably were served lamb kidneys sautéed in butter and vermouth on toast.  We children all loved that meal, and when I became a father and head of a household, my wife and I often served them to our own children as a Sunday morning treat.  Earlier on when I was a college student I often baby sat for my brother and his wife, enjoying a dinner with them before they set off for whatever they had planned for the evening.  My  sister-in-law kept a tight budget on the income of a young resident in the university hospital supplemented by her doing night nursing when he could be home.  A favorite was beef heart which I grew to love, although I must admit she sometimes did cook the thing to death, and the expression shoe leather was entirely appropriate.  When I was in graduate school my first wife and I bought it cheap at Haymarket and learned how to cook it in way we thought was better, and kept it relatively tender.  Calf's liver was something we were served quite often in my childhood home, and always very poorly cooked, that is to say, always overcooked, and it was indeed shoe leather.  It really wasn't until I was in my forties that my live-in boyfriend taught me how to take care that liver is cooked just to the point where it was still pink, and delicious--oh, all those awful liver dinners of my childhood, how sad! My second wife who had lived around the world as a child was exceptionally adventurous with cuisine, if indifferent to fashioning menus.  So she was happy to go along with me when I brought home fresh beef tongue, and the children were happy to eat it, served on a platter, and still looking as though it were going to be part of an utterance of "Moooh."  What I wouldn't give for a slice of tongue right now!  And we had cervelle au beure noire, that's calf's brains, again delicious, delicious, and sweetbreads a prettified name for some gland in the cow's neck or something like that, although I don't remember the children relishing that item, just as they would not go near shad roe sauteed simply in butter with some capers thrown in.  I almost never buy any of those bloody steak items I see at the meat department, and oh, Lord, I am so tired of chicken.  Beans give me gas, and Richard does not like them.  Thank heavens we live by oceans, since what we eat almost every night of the week is some kind of fish.  Oddly enough in the Iowa of my childhood far away from salt water we almost never ever were served fish, and when it appeared quickly turned our noses up at it.  De gustibus and all that.

What To Do?

The mellow glow of satisfaction is almost palpable.  The garden is perfectly pruned, manicured, the tiny new leaves on the roses and peonies signal all the beautiful blossoms just waiting to burst forth.  The items on my desk are now all neatly stowed, the magazines on the side table of my reading chair are arranged title by title, the to-do list of bills to be paid, letters to be written has dwindled to nothing.  I have been north not even two weeks and I have everything in order.  Now what?  A terrible emptiness, like a wave surging on the beach, sweeps in, and leaves me vacant, motionless in my chair.  Now what?  I need a project.  Two years ago I was making the last changes to a manuscript which was about to be published, last year I was preparing for the October publication.  Now what?  I keep making notes for a novel that I would love to write.  Why don't you?  I have so far in my life written four novels, none of them ever published.  My story will never be that of the unrecognized genius with his novel gathering dust in the closet.  No, I have many, many friends in the publishing industry, and over the years have the very great fortune of getting my manuscripts read, and I have had the luxury of receiving honest criticism from my friends.  So these manuscripts remain unpublished, and serve as a stern reminder that it does not look like I have the talent for writing fiction (although several years ago when the industry was not in such desperate shape one publisher friend did say of one of my pieces "If you keep sending it around long enough, you probably will find somebody somewhere who will take this on.  It isn't that bad.")  Self publishing is the way to go, I hear on every side.  But do I really care that much?  I toy with writing this novel I have more or less worked out in my head as an exercise.  Who cares if it is read?  Who cares if it gets published?  True, true.  Another voice within my head, a sterner critic reminds me all too crisply that the fantasy story hews so closely to a true life experience that maybe it has been dealt with sufficiently in my memoir.  That leads me to another fantasy of writing some episodes from my life fully disclosed in the memoir with the major details of the narrative radically altered, making a kind of Rashomon version of my life story.  That might be amusing.  For a day?  A week?  I need a real project, like going every day to work in a soup kitchen, but they don't seem to have such things in the small beach town where I live.  I had a very dear close friend who died last summer at 97 with whom I spoke almost daily for fifty years, and because we were resolutely intimate and honest in our conversations I had the sad privilege of bearing witness to the long, slow windup--or should I say rundown?--of her life.  When she retired, she bought a small printing press, and began to turn out exquisite hand made books of infinite delight and impeccable quality, and then she grew slower at that and the inspiration became scantier, and the contacts fewer, and she would complain to me sighing.  "Oh, Charles, I need a project."

Mrs. Chancellor

The news that Jeanne Cooper, who played Mrs. Chancellor on the daytime soap "The Young and the Restless" has died took me back over fifty years when, strange as it may seem, I had been invited to be a faculty adviser to the Delta Chi fraternity at Stanford University.  It was a culture utterly foreign to me, these energetic, butch, athletic, happy-go-lucky young males with whom I ate lunch most weekdays, and tried to match them in their exuberant conversation on subjects of which I knew nothing, specifically sporting events or sporting prowess of every kind.  But what was truly unusual about my experience at the fraternity house was the daily ritual of retiring after lunch to a kind of lounge set up with a for-those-days large television screen on which we all lounged about to watch "The Young and the Restless." If it had been a group of gay male students, not that such a group would have self identified in the sixties, I could easily have understood it, imagining the high camp comments that the program would have generated. But, no, these young men watched with utter seriousness, for some reason entirely engrossed in the daily turmoil and challenges faced by the women in the drama.  I have always wondered how the ritual derived and I have to believe that when these guys were little tykes, they sat at their mother's knee watching the program, a cultural habit reinforced over the years when they stayed home from school sick, and watched it while lying in bed, just as I a couple of generations earlier listened to things like "The Romance of Helen Trent," while suffering colds and sore throats.  As i watched Cooper play Mrs. Chancellor I was always struck by what seemed to me a great difference in the lines and attitudes given her.  The other women clearly did not like her much; she was rich which made her different, but they also ascribed to her a malevolence that they so rigorously and so righteously eschewed in their own personal relationships.  I saw it quite otherwise. She was smart, it seemed to me, whereas the others were always slipping into behaviors and emotions which led them from one compromising situation to another.  They were as a group all losers, and in that respect, I imagine mirrored the interior sense of failure housewives had back then.  Mrs. Chancellor was in a certain sense the villain of the piece, but with that went the understanding that she was a successful problem solver, had sharp, well defined opinions on everything.  In my eyes, and in male terms, she was a success, and they were failures. She seemed to me to be the magnet for condemnation to deflect attention away from the other women's intellectual laziness and indulgence in the porn of cheap emotion.  It sometimes surprised me that none of the boys with whom I watched this got my reading of it, and I wondered if I was just projecting.  I never discussed Mrs. Chancellor with any woman because I never ran across a woman in our social world who watched the program.  My film viewing experience with the guys extended one night to a porno film they rented and projected for the group to which I was invited.  It was my first time, at age thirty one, seeing porno, and my reaction was to laugh uproariously, at the distorted plot line, the stilted dialogue, the abrupt, awkward, and what I could only imagine as uncomfortable contortions of the bodies in their filmed ecstasy. The boys were offended. It was a night to remember, and here again, I was on some completely different wave length.  I guess I never would have made it as a fraternity man.

A Little Learning Is A Dangerous Thing

The extraordinary white middle class burst of enthusiasm for living in Manhattan and Brooklyn translates of course into the anxiety provoking jockeying for positions for their children in the so-called "good" public schools.  "Good" means adhering to the values of the upper middle class in terms of deportment, ambition, and execution.  Those parents have my complete sympathy even if when I try to thread my way between these giant baby carriages sometimes coming at one in tandem on Broadway in the eighties makes me grit my teeth and wish them all off to Scarsdale where they belong.  I raised four children so my wife and I were naturally as anxious as the next for our children's success.  My childhood had been spent at a private experimental school run by the Education Department of the State University of Iowa until I switched in grade seven to the public schools where I stayed until I graduated except for a year of at Phillips Andover.  My wife started out at Punahou in Hawaii and ended at Abbott Academy in Andover.  Did she ever go to a public school?  I doubt it.  Our children went K through whatever in the Palo Alto schools, the population of which was as you can imagine even back then upper middle class highly educated white people.  We moved to Brookline, Massachusetts; they went to the Pierce School in the Village before we bought a house in the Runkel School district.  As we were preparing our move, the Superintendent summoned me to his office to suggest that we might want to keep our children at Pierce because "Runkel is almost 98% Jewish."  This was not the anti-Semitic observation one might imagine; after all, the guy himself was Jewish.  No, he worried, I think, that these simple minded goyim would lose their way in the minefields of ambition and performance at the Runkel School.  But we had moved to Brookline expressly so our kids could sit in classes with Jews!  Of course, as time went by it was ironic that the very very upper class WASPs left the Brookline public schools for private schools where they would be with "their own kind,"and the Jewish kids after their bar mitzvahs sort of retreated into exclusive Jewish friendships, leaving my children ironically enough to make friends with the children of the Irish Catholic laboring class who were the towns public works employees.  My oldest boy chose not to go to college when he graduated high school, and his brother followed suit the following year.  The uproar over these decisions from my parents in law was vigorous, but my wife and I refused to impose our anxieties upon the boys.  They grew up in a home where their father was a professor, their mother an architect, where the friends of the family at frequent dinner parties made conversation based on education, wit,  intelligence, and experience suggestive of what universities have on offer for the young.  They either felt they had enough of that or for other reasons did not want it.  I still hear "you should have pushed them harder."  Ah, well, many are called, few are chosen.

Penny

Christened Mary Lois Pendleton (Mary after her mother), she hated that name, and always introduced herself as Penny, also the nickname of her father, the admiral.  At the start of our relationship she was startled to discover that my first wife, dead all of two months, had a monogram MPB (Mary Powers Beye); she was determined to change her name legally so as not to have that same set of initials.  She went to court to become Penelope Pendleton three weeks before our wedding, much to the anger of her parents, who characteristically sent her a telegram from New Hampshire to Cambridge, rather than pick up the phone and remonstrate with her.  She was resistive and combative by nature, although always quiet and repressed in her behavior, so if you did not know her, you might easily miss the steel in her.  I did not notice it at first, it was such a relief to be a partner of a quiet woman who seemed to take direction, after the five years of Mary's sense of high drama in the conjugal scene.  Penny had a twin brother who was always the adversary in her determination to succeed.  Males were so obviously preferred in the military culture of her family.  Brother was an engineer, she would become an architect, that is, something to do with structure, but with aesthetics, taste, and imagination.  Architecture in the fifties was very much a man's profession, stayed that way throughout her working life.  She spent her life pushing for parity with males.  Do you suppose that might have been part motive behind her choice of a gay male husband; she instinctively knew that he identified enough with her as a female, however much his behavior and thought patterns were traditionally masculine, that he would grant her a kind of psychic parity.  And, gay though he may well have been, they spent enough time making out in the early years of their marriage, to ensure that she never had the slightest sense that she was missing out on something, and she would know, since she had lost her virginity at sixteen, and was an active player thereafter. She told her daughters that she resented the sexual freedom of males. She could not, however, escape being a female.  She compromised her progress in architecture school, when her father lay seriously ill with phlebitis in Philadelphia, requiring the desperate amputation of his leg; she was the twin who made the journey to his bedside repeatedly, woman, daughter, the caregiver, if only figuratively.  The new wife, working her first professional job, soon was a mother, and with that her career came to a halt; mothers in the fifties stayed home, and on into the sixties as three siblings joined the first little darling. Ten years she lost to the wifely ideal, and then she was back into the race, with a husband picking up the slack, once the dirty work of parenting infants was over.  In her mother's last years she was in constant attendance on the weekends of a woman who had always been withholding; she was the good daughter.  Happily she had the satisfaction before she died of having made it in a major architecture firm.  Along the way the setbacks were horrendous, a major automobile accident which almost killed her, and then, when she was in her sixties, a ghastly fall from the upper floor of her family's barn which left her permanently crippled.  But she was never bitter, because she was always level headed enough to remember the fall was her own fault.  Her willingness to make that observation is evidence of her triumphant honesty, a kind of grim, plain, New England trait, so at variance with the theatrical smoke and mirrors style of her would be matinee idol of a husband.  As she told her children once in a moment of great candor, she would long since have taken them off and left him, if she had had the money.  At least she had the last thirty years of her life unencumbered up to her death May 8, 2005.